TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 1991

This paper presents key aspects of the whole language perspective; describes examples of whole language principles in practice in elementary, secondary, and adult ESOL programs; and reviews recent whole language research on second language development.

WHOLE LANGUAGE PRINCIPLES

The term whole language has become a popular, even band-wagon term for native speakers of English in elementary education
and is beginning to be used in secondary and adult education (Goodman, Bird, & Goodman, 1991; & #147;Special report,” 1991). Whole language is both a theoretical perspective and a movement affecting both instruction and research. The movement grew from an original focus on the teaching of reading to native speakers of English; it grew to encompass writing and then the processes of teaching and learning, which in turn involve the roles of teacher and student. What began as a holistic way to teach reading has become a movement for change, key aspects of which are respect for each stud ent as a member of a culture and as a creator of knowledge, and respect for each teacher as a professional. The movement has had its greatest impact in elementary schools and with L1 students and is only beginning to affect secondary and adult education.
In the field of TESOL we are starting to see “whole language” in articles, in book titles, and in convention presentations. Where does the term come from? What does it mean, both to its originators and to us in TESOL? What effect is it having on our teaching of English to speakers of other languages? In this article, I propose to address these questions by summarizing the key points of the whole language perspective; describing some examples of whole language principles in practice in elementary, secondary, and adult ESOL programs; and suggesting how the whole language perspective affects research in L2 development. [p.521]

Background

The term whole language comes n ot from linguists but from educators—people like Harste and Burke (1977), Ken and Yetta Goodman (1981), and Watson (1989)—who began using it in reference to how English-speaking children become readers. (See “Whole language,” 1989, for more detailed descriptions of whole language philosophy and history; see also Y. Goodman, 1989, 1991.)
They asserted that language is a whole (hence the name), that any attempt to fragment it into parts—whether these be grammatical pat terns, vocabulary lists, or phonics “families’’—destroys it. If language isn’t kept whole, it isn’t language anymore. Harste and Burke (1977) first suggested the term when they described three different theories of reading: phonics, which presumed that reading was basically a process of turning letters into sounds; skills, which presumed that reading was basically a hierarchy of skills, including phonics, word recognition, and comprehension skills; and whole langu age, which defined reading as a psycholinguistic process (K. S. Goodman, 1967) in which readers interact with texts. Readers predict what comes next; sample cues from the semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic systems; and use their knowledge of the world, of the language, and their purposes for reading to interact with the text and to arrive at meaning (Harste & Burke, 1977).
These early leaders of the movement read the research in composition by Graves (1983), Calkins (1983, 1986), an d Atwell (1987), and as a result, they enlarged their focus: Whole language proponents began to think of literacy as including both reading and writing. The researchers in composition were convincing in their focus on the processes of writing instead of on written products. Instead of looking at writing primarily as a means of demonstrating knowledge to a teacher, whole language proponents now viewed writing as a means of discovering for oneself what one thinks. In her address to TESOL in New York, Calkins (1991) moved even further, talking about how we use writing to create and recreate ourselves.
About the same time that the early whole language advocates were incorporating recent research in composition into their view, they began to read Louise Rosenblatt (1938/1976), who described reading as a process of transacting with text. In The Reader, the Text, and the Poem, Rosenblatt (1978) asserted that, instead of simply interacting, the reader and text “transact” (P. 17), and together create the poem. Rosenblatt also helped explain how individual interpretation of text (private meaning) related to a commonly accepted interpretation (public meaning), and she [p.522] distinguished between “aesthetic” and “efferent” reading (p. 22)–reading for the experience and reading to find out. For most whole language educators, whose interest had been primarily the reading process,this focus on literature and its interpretation was a significant s tep. The research into the reading of children whose first language was not English (Goodman & Goodman, 1978) had confirmed that these readers’ backgrounds strongly affect the meaning constructed from the page. Rosenblatt was convincing in arguing that we needed to look much more closely at what was being read—the text, at why it was being read, and at how the aesthetic possibilities could be explored. Today’s whole language emphasis on literature study (Peterson & Eeds, 1990) and an appreciation of multiple interpretations owes much to the rediscovery of Rosenblatt. As Edelsky (1991) points out, the recognition of the validity of different interpretations promotes pluralism.
Edelsky, Altwerger, & Flores (1991) offer probably the clearest description of what whole language currently is and what it is not; Whole Language: What’s the Difference? opens with “First and foremost, whole language is a professional theory, an explicit theory in practi ce. . . .Whole language weaves together a theoretical view of language, language learning, and learning into a particular stance on education” (p. 7). It is not a method, nor a collection of strategies, techniques, or materials although certain approaches and materials are characteristic of whole language classes.

Principles of Knowledge and of Language
This “professional theory in practice” is based in part on the belief that knowledge is socially construct ed, rather than received or discovered. Traditionally, formal education has been viewed as a matter of transferring knowledge from the teacher’s head and from textbooks into the students’ heads. But if knowledge is constructed, there is no single right answer, either in the text or the teacher.
More, the teacher, rather than transmitting knowledge to the students, collaborates with them to create knowledge. This is the foundation for the whole language emphasis on student choice and on collaboration. A second basic premise is that the major purpose of language is the creation and communication of meaning. We use language to think: In order to discover what we know, we sometimes write, perhaps talk to a friend, or mutter to ourselves silently. We can think in other ways (for example, you can visualize Picasso’s Guernica or recall the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), but language is our primary way of creating meaning. Similarly, language is our [p. 523] primary means of communicating to others. An obvious corollary of this is the assertion that language is, always used purposefully.
TESOL professionals who are accustomed to functional syllabi easily understand and accept this corollary: They recognize the myriad functions of language and they may use those functions as the basis for organizing the information they present to students learning English as an additional language. An important difference between the whole language and the functional ESL curriculum is that the whole language curriculum demands that language functions always be authentic, always be meaningful. That is, an ESL class might practice some language used in apologies, even though no one in class is really trying to apologize to anyone else. A whole language perspective requires an authentic, “real” situation in which one person truly needs to apologize to another. (See Edelsky, 1987, for a full discussion of authenticity.)
Real is a bywor d in whole language classes. Notwithstanding the difficulties in defining authenticity, a commitment to real activities is an important component of the whole language perspective. Real activities are defined as those relevant to students’ interests, lives, and communities. Activities designed to practice behaviors or skills that will someday be needed are not considered real under this model: Why ask students to engage in practice runs when they could be working on something immediately an d directly relevant?
Materials too must be real. Too often textbooks used in grades K-12 are written by committees of people who don’t teach (and often have never taught), are purchased by other committees of people who may or may not teach, but seldom teach the classes which will use the textbooks, and are read by teachers and students in classrooms far removed from both publisher and textbook selection committee. Textbooks to teach reading, “basals,” have come under attack by Goodman, Shannon, Freeman, & Murphy (1988) and Shannon (1989, 1990) and others. These researchers have convinced many teachers and school administrators to use funds allocated for textbooks and consumable workbooks for trade books of children’s literature, both fictional and nonfictional. California’s decision to replace basals with a literature program in all schools statewide has given strength and support to teachers who want to convince their administration and school boa rds to try the same. Whole language programs require well-stocked large classroom libraries from which students can select what they want to read, both in free reading time and in literature study. In whole language classrooms students read real books.
Writing too must be real. The students are invited to write for themselves and for others, rather than just for the teacher. Research [p.524] on the writing of L1 school children (Atwell, 1987; Calkins, 1983; Graves, 1983) has convinced many teachers that it is the processes, not the products, of writing that deserve their attention. As a result, in whole language classes students select their own topics, their own audiences, and write for their own purposes and to their own standards. The writing workshop approach postpones the correction of errors to the prepublication step of editing; this frees both students and teacher to concentrate on matters of content, organization, and style. In a process approach to composing, students and teacher can look at successive drafts with an eye towards increasing clarity, or deepening mood, or using language more vigorously or artfully. Language’s “aesthetic qualities . . . the musicality, design and balance and symbolism that give pleasure to language users” (Edelsky et al., 1991, pp. 13-14) allow language users to play with language and to revel in the creative possibilities that range from jump-rope rhymes, through puns and limericks and songs, all the way to Haml et.
Whole language advocates recognize that language is both individual and social. “Who and what we are is determined in great part by our language. Since we are all uniquely individual with an almost infinite number of different life experiences, our oral and written language often reflects those differences” (Kazemek, 1981, p. 1). Both where we grew up and which social class we first belonged to mark our speech; our education and our profession show in both our speech and our writing. One obvious application of this principle is the acceptance (not just tolerance) of nonprestige dialects. When writing teachers support their students in finding and using their own voices, they are putting this principle into practice.
Language is social. It makes a difference who says what to whom, how, and why. What is the social relationship of two people communicating? What are their purposes? What is the situation? The language used by a person on a factory floor expressing anger at perceived incompetence differs, depending on whether the individual is speaking to the supervisor or is the supervisor.
Language use is always in a social context, and this applies to both oral and written language, to both first and second language use.
Applying this principle to the whole language class results in paying attention to audience and to context: Both speakers and writers are urged to consider their audience, the person(s) they are addressing; both are reminded to consider the setting in which their messages will be received. Part of the wholeness of whole language is the inclusion of literacy as a part of language. Because reading and writing are not [p. 525 ] separate systems from language, in a literate society, using written language is as natural as using conversation, and the uses of written language develop as naturally as do the uses of oral language (Goodman & Goodman,1981). The four language modes—speaking, writing, listening, and rea ding—are mutually supportive and are not artificially separated in whole language classes.
Many traditional ESL programs have separated the language modes, offering classes in reading, in writing, in conversation, in pronunciation, in listening. Whole language classes use all four modes, but may offer ESL students the opportunity to zero in on the aspect of language they most need help with. I remember a Yemeni seaman I worked with in Detroit years ago: Ahmed [1] spoke English fluentl y with near-native pronunciation, but in English he could read only the most common of environmental print signs (STOP, McDonald’s) and could write only his name. Ahmed wanted to pass the Seaman First Class test so he could move up in his chosen profession; for him, tutoring in written English seemed the best option. We used his excellent oral English as the base; he dictated his text to me using the language experience approach (Rigg, 1991). Recently a Vietnamese friend of mine, a young wo man who writes so beautifully in English that she’s been published several times, spoke to an audience of teachers about her language learning experiences;as I listened and watched the puzzled faces of the audience, I wished she had access to a tutor who would use her writing as the basis for work in pronunciation.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

The principles of knowledge and of language lead to principles of teaching and learning. Primary am ong these is the principle that curriculum and instruction need to be both meaning-centered and student-centered. Meaning-centered means that oral and written language experiences must be purposeful, functional, and real. Reading and writing activities must serve real purposes (e.g., to entertain, to convince, to explore, to excuse oneself, and so on). Choice is vital in a whole language class, because without the ability to select activities, materials, and conversational partners, the students cannot use language for their own purposes. So teachers “issue invitations” to students, offering a choice of activities and materials. Authenticity, as defined by Edelsky (1987), is necessary.
Whatever the students are doing, whether suggested by themselves or by the teacher, is for their own purposes. If students are writing [p.526] letters, for example, it is because they want to communicate through writing with the people they are writing to; the letters will be mailed, and (the writers hope) answered. They are not writing pretend letters to practice the form of a friendly or business letter.
Student-centered means building the curriculum in the class with and for the students (Nunan, 1988). A major aspect of the whole language view is respect for each student, with all that that entails in terms of respect for the student’s language, home, and culture. This contrasts strongly with the typical traditional class, whether elementary or university level: The standard curriculum in public schools is usually determined by committees of people who have never met the people who actually use the curriculum—the students and teachers. Curriculum committees at the school district level and at the state department of education level do not know any of the students; legislators are even further removed from the people their educational decisions most directly affect. Related to the principle of respect for the student, and involvement of the students in determining their own curriculum, is the principle of respect for the teacher. A whole language perspective advocates mutual respect among professionals.
Typically, in whole language programs, teachers meet as committees to decide on curriculum, on evaluation, and on the management of their school; they choose themselves what books will be on the classroom shelves, deciding themselves how to spend both book and nonbook funds. The training and experience of professional teachers best qu alify them to judge what the students in their rooms need and want. Only teachers have close daily contact with the students. Only they are able to determine what materials and activities are appropriate for their students at any time. They know what to offer. Also, their choice is as vital as the students’; if the teachers don’t have choices, they cannot offer much choice to their students.
This principle of respect for the teacher, coupled with students’ obvious delight in student-centered, meaningful activities, has helped make whole language a large-scale movement in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. Teachers have joined together in peer support groups, often calling their group Teachers Applying Whole Language, or TAWL. These groups are loosely affiliated across Canada and the U.S. through the Whole Language Umbrella, which drew 2,000 to its first conference in the summer of 1990 in St. Louis, MO, and almost that many in August 1991 to Phoenix, AZ. It is not exc lusively a grass-roots teachers’ movement, since it was started and is still led by teacher educators at various universities. These teachers and teacher educators have held “a whole day of whole [p.527] language” for the last 2 years at the national conferences of both the International Reading Association (IRA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The movement has become so widespread that it has become a bandwagon: Now a wide variety of publishers and prese nters have adopted the label whole language and are using it to market materials and workshops that 10 years ago were labeled back to basics. (See recent issues of IRA’s Reading Today newsletter for sample ads.)
One more indication of respect for the teacher is that teachers are increasingly recognized as researchers. Bissex and Bullock’s (1987) collection of case studies by classroom teachers typifies the sort of research whole language teachers are undertaking and publishing.(W hole language research is discussed later in this paper.)

EVALUATION

Whole language teachers often protest being required to administer standardized tests such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), arguing that those tests do not accurately describe their students’ abilities, nor do they predict their students’ performance. Teachers question not only what standardized tests are testing but what they are teaching the stude nts. In my state of Arizona, every child must take the ITBS every year, whether the child is a speaker of English, Spanish, Navajo, or any of the several other languages in the state. (English arrived in Arizona about 150 years after Spanish and thousands of years after First Nation languages.) Teachers in several schools report horror stories of children becoming physically ill from the stress of taking the ITBS. They also tell bitterly funny stories of instances in which the ITBS score indic ated a child could not do something—simple addition, for example—when the teacher had ample evidence that the child could. My own favorite story came from a member of a local school board who had insisted on basing teachers’ and principals’ salaries on schools’ ITBS scores: This man’s daughter received one of the lowest ITBS scores in the district—she had lost her place on the answer sheet.
Evaluation, like curriculum, needs to be meaning-centered and stu dent-centered. Assessment and evaluation of whole language education must itself be holistic (Goodman, Goodman, & Hood, 1989; Harp, 1991). We cannot assess growth by using standardized or criterion-referenced tests which measure isolated, partial, or purposeless language skills (Taylor, 1990). Whole language classrooms typically use student self-evaluation as part of ongoing and informal assessment which allows the instructor and student to document growth and to plan for future instructio n. Because [p.528] students themselves establish their goals, students themselves monitor their progress (Brindley, 1986). Holistic assessment in grades K-12 takes place with teachers keeping narrative records of their “kidwatching” (Y. Goodman, 1985) and portfolios of student writing and reading. Teachers’ records are based on conferring with the students about their reading and writing, noting difficulties, efficient strategies, personal goals, types of texts they need or want t o read and write, and so on; preparing a checklist of specific things that the teacher and the student want to accomplish during a specific time period; collecting samples of a student’s reading (perhaps on tape, using some type of miscue analysis) and writing and charting growth over time. (Kazemek, 1989, p. 5)

WHOLE LANGUAGE IN ESOL CONTEXTS

Elementary Education
The preceding discussions have referred to L1 speakers. Do whole languag e principles hold true in L2 learning? Whole language advocates believe they do, citing two arguments:

1. L2 can develop much as does L1. L2 classes should offer a language-nurturing environment, paying attention to doing things with language rather than to language itself (Krashen & Terrell, 1983). This includes literacy as well as oral language.
2. L2, like Ll, develops through interaction with peers, rather than through imitation of a teacher’s model or throu gh formal study. The holistic ESOL class develops a strong sense of community in the class and school, and uses a variety of collaborative learning activities.

The most obvious place to find whole language in ESOL practice is in elementary classrooms in schools where many of the children speak English as an additional language. Else Hamayan (personal communication, 1988) calls these students “potentially English proficient (PEP)” kids—in contrast to the U.S. gov ernment’s labeling of them as limited English proficient. I find the terms LEP and limited speakers derogatory; alternatively, one might label limited English speakers those handicapped by monolingualism, people limited to English.
In elementary schools with PEP students, there are two whole language approaches which do not pull out the PEP students from their grade-level classrooms for ESL instruction. The first approach integrates L2 with L1 students and supplies ESL assistance in t he class. McCloskey’s (1988) multicultural curriculum for grades K–6, [p.529] English Everywhere designed for the Dallas school system, exemplifies this approach. Enright and McCloskey’s Integrating English (1988) is probably the best-known current text for teachers who want to integrate PEP students into multicultural classes and at the same time integrate content-area subjects into thematic units. An example of a school which puts this into practice is Fair Oaks in Redwood City, California. The teachers who work there have documented the changes of this bilingual school in Becoming a Whole Language School (Bird, 1987).
The second major approach offers academic instruction in Ll, with ESL taught more implicitly than explicitly. This approach is suitable for bilingual programs in which all nonnative speakers of English share one home language. Both approaches can be seen at Machan School in Phoenix, Arizona. The school has about 800 students in grades K-6, most of whom qualify as “at-risk” for both state and federal assistance: Ninety percent receive free lunch (an indicator of low income); school scores on the state-required Iowa Test of Basic Skills were lowest in the district in 1989 and 1990; over half of the students speak Spanish as a home language. For the last 3 years, the school has been receiving special state funds for a K-3 bilingual project. As the external evaluator of that project for the past 2 years, I visited Machan School fr equently, sitting in on classes, observing and interacting with students, teachers, staff, and community members. I believe it is an excellent example of whole language in an elementary ESOL context.
Machan’s principal, Lyn Davey, and the K-3 project director, Kelly Draper, share a whole language view of education, a view which includes staff and community participation in the management of the school. When Dr. Davey became principal 3 years ago, she indicated to the staff that she he ld a strongly holistic and collaborative view of teaching, learning, and administering, and she invited teachers to join her in implementing this holistic philosophy. As the school begins its 4th year in September 1991, the staff is cohesive, with a strong sense of community and of professionalism. If we could peek into various classrooms, we would see great diversity in teaching styles, but an almost unanimous philosophy of teaching, one that is meaning-centered and student-centered.
A Ma chan kindergarten class exemplifies the first approach– integration of L1 and L2 students in a multicultural class. Actually, it is two kindergartens; one team of two teachers and an aide collaborate to create one large class in two rooms with two languages in use at all times. The teachers use thematic units, which allow for the integration of different content-area subjects within [p.530] one theme. The human body was the theme last fall. Early in October, I watched Spanish- and English-s peaking students work in pairs to outline each other’s body silhouette on black paper. The children cut out their own silhouettes and, throughout the next several days, marked with white chalk the different bones of the human body, looking at a life-size skeleton and feeling their own arms and hands to sense where the bones really were in the flesh. These chalk skeletons on black paper served as wall decorations for the school’s celebration of both Halloween, a traditional Anglo-Americ an holiday, and the Day of the Dead, a traditional Mexican holiday celebrated on November 2. This typifies the sorts of activities that these students engage in: Science and art blend together as students study a topic very important to them—in this case their own bodies—with an amazing maturity for 6-year-olds. Throughout an hour, many students move easily from language to language, and the teachers respond in the language selected by the student.
The two teachers believe that it is important to validate and value not only Spanish and English but other languages, so although most of their conversation and reading materials are in these two major languages, the teachers bring in examples of other languages. In both of these rooms, as in almost all the classes at Machan School, students write daily in their journals, on whatever topics they choose, in whichever language is most comfortable (Peyton & Reed, 1990), and their teachers write back. Students read for pl easure daily, selecting from a wide variety of materials, from magazines through children’s literature. One of the children who began the class. as a monolingual English speaker now offers to translate English expressions into Spanish; Albert is very proud of his new linguistic ability. Fred wrote a story in English about his grandparents, who live in Mexico; he then rewrote the story in Spanish so that his beloved grandparents could read what he had written about them. One of last year 6;s students, now a first grader, has moved from using only Spanish to reading and writing in English, and doing it so well that her classmates say she is the best reader in the room.
The second approach uses the students’ home language for instruction. One Machan kindergarten exemplifying the second approach is just beginning to use whole language ideas. All of the instruction in this room is in Spanish. The teacher grew up attending Mexican schools and taught in Mexico until recen tly, so she knows all the songs, finger games, riddles, stories, and so on, that are appropriate for children of this age from Mexican culture. She began to teach in the U.S. only last year, and only then did she have [p.531] the opportunity to try any whole language ideas. I remember visiting her room in October: She was helping 20 Spanish-speaking youngsters learn a new song in Spanish. After a few visits, I suggested that perhaps the students could start dictating their stories to her, and co uld start writing to her in journals, rather than spending over half of their time on drilling of individual letters and letter-sound relationships. The teacher was quite skeptical. “How can they write anything?” she asked me. “They don’t know their letters yet.” But she tried both the language experience dictation and the dialogue journals, and within the month she was inviting me to return to her class to see the books her children were making. Sure enough, over half of these PEP kids had written stories in Spanish about their families or pets or friends, and were proud to pose for my camera with their very own books. The success of letting the kids write what they wanted to, using whatever invented spelling they created, in whatever handwriting they had at this stage, convinced this teacher of both the efficiency and the joy of this new approach.
In many of Machan’s kindergarten and first grades, the students are writing before they are reading. The kids are figuring out how text works by writing their own texts and by hearing literature read to them two to four times a day. The teachers accept the students’ texts, and comment on the meaning rather than on the form. One tiny girl who had recently arrived from Mexico filled each page of her journal with a picture of a house underneath which was her emergent writing—lines and circles: ///O/O/O/OOO////. She knew that writing and drawing were different, and she could read what she had written to the teacher: “Mi mamá es en la casa.” Later she began to use letters of the alphabet, beginning with M, the first letter of her name.
In this classroom, as in many, theory follows practice. As teachers try some of the techniques or materials recommended by whole language advocates, they want to know why these were so successful, and so go on to learn more of the theoretical foundations.

Secondary Education
The whole language movement has had its least effect in secondary education. Of the 2,000 people attending the first Whole Language Umbrella conference, fewer than 500 represented middle and high school teachers; similarly, fewer than a quarter of those attending the second Umbrella conference came from secondary education. Secondary schools differ from elementary schools in many respects: the most obvious is the number of students each [p. 532] teacher meets daily—easily 150 for secondary teachers, up to 30 for elementary. In part because of the number of students, many secondary teachers focus on teaching subjects, not students.
Secondary teachers typically face rigid curriculum demands: A 10th-grade English class in Virginia, for example, is required to study early American literature, including the novels of J. F. Cooper and the sermons of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. It demands every last ounce of a teacher’s power to drag 30 bored 16-year-olds through 45 minutes of reading a nd "discussing" “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”; in such contexts, there’s little energy left among teacher or students to contemplate an alternative text or topic.
Other pressures on secondary teachers to conform quietly are the tests their students must pass to graduate or, in some cases, to participate in extracurricular activities. In elementary school, children who fail an ITBS can still play on the swings at recess, and can often still move into the ne xt grade with their peers, especially in light of research on the harmful effects of retention. But in many high schools, the motto is now No Pass, No Play and, in some cases, Low Test Scores = No Graduation. These pressures, along with the newspaper publication of average SAT scores and articles demanding more from teachers, all pressure secondary teachers into teaching to the test and following state- and district-determined guidelines very closely.
There are pockets of whole language in middle and high schools, especially among teachers of English or foreign languages. Secondary teachers are increasingly finding students from whole language elementary schools in their classes, and these students push for meaningful, relevant activities and materials, creating pressure on their teachers to question the assumption that all of their students should read the same thing at the same time and receive the same message from it. Some of these teachers manage to develop curricula with their students, curricula more relevant than the one developed by the state or district. Some secondary teachers are leaders in the whole language movement: Gilles and her colleagues, for example, wrote Whole Language Strategies for Secondary Students (1988) while they were all teaching middle and high school by day and taking classes with Dorothy Watson at the University of Missouri by night.
Wigginton’s Foxfire projects (1986), in which L1 high school students interview local elders and write up the elders’ special knowledge, have captured the attention and imagination of many English teachers across the United States, but only a few have actually tried using oral history of the local community with their ESOL high school English/language arts students. One middle [p.533] school in Tucson (Carrillo School) has used oral history: The bilingual students have interviewed the viejos in their school’s neighborhood, getting the old ones to tell stories of how the nei ghborhood used to be, and published these stories illustrated by old photographs and by student art. Our Hispanic Leaders and Celebrations in Our Neighborhood are titles of two of the books the students produced. In Fresno, CA, Waylon Jackson at Yosemite Middle School (D. Freeman, personal communication, 1991) publishes his students’ writing and photos, and has the books hard bound; at $7 a book, the volumes are considered bargains by the students’ families and friends. Currently, Jack son’s students are researching family medical practices and home remedies. This project will culminate in the 1992 class volume. Sheltered English programs for ESOL students sometimes use holistic techniques. At Fresno High School, David Freeman (personal communication, 1991) consults in setting up courses with teachers from biology and social studies in collaboration with ESL teachers at the local high schools; he says the content-area teachers quickly recognize the fun of working with E SOL students, and they recognize that an experiential approach to concept development will work with all of their students. Freeman says there is a push towards student collaboration on “real” projects and a new tendency to ask discussion questions rather than display questions.
Here, too, practice runs ahead of theory.

Adult Education
The term whole language is seldom used for adults learning English language and literacy. Participator is the term u sed by some educators of adults who want their classroom to be a community of learners, and who believe that student choice, student input into curriculum, and self-evaluation are vital.
Participatory teachers often cite the teachings of Paulo Freire, from whom they have learned that literacy is much more than decoding someone. else’s message, Literacy can be empowering and liberating because it opens up to adult students ways to understand and to alter their worlds (Freire, 1970; F reire & Macedo, 1987).
The Bilingual Community Literacy Training Project in Boston is a program in which Haitian Creole speakers become literate in their own dialect and then become the teachers for others of their community (Auerbach, 1990). English literacy thus builds on first language literacy. Two New York City union programs—one at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and one at the Amal-gamated Clothing and Textile Workers union (Spener, 1991)—use [p.53 4] literacy in Spanish and in English to serve the needs of the workers, modeling both the importance of functional aspects of literacy and community involvement.
Gary Pharness’ (personal communication, 1991) workplace literacy programs in the Vancouver, B. C., area are based on a writing model of literacy development. Both L1 and L2 speakers of English write personal narratives of their lives. Pharness uses writing rather than reading as the basis for literacy because he believes it is vital for adults to write their own stories and then to discuss these with peers. Through the writing and the discussion, the authors receive both an acceptance of their own histories and a chance to learn how their story is perceived by others. This has the same advantages as dialogue between friends: Ideas can be articulated and then examined. The writers not only become more literate but they become more confident about themselves as people, not just as workers. Increased self-esteem is a major goal of Pharness’ programs, and many of the workers in his programs seem to be meeting that goal. One woman student after a year of writing in the literacy class decided to quit her job: “I’m tired of correcting my boss’s spelling,” she said. Her new job pays better, and the only spelling she corrects is her own.
Mark McCue directs Invergarry Learning Centre’s literacy program (Rigg, 1990). Like Pharness, a former colleague of his, McCue uses the writing of personal narrative as the basis for literacy. His students include both L1 and L2 speakers of English.
As students enter the literacy class, they receive a black notebook and are instructed to write something, anything, preferably about themselves. Those who cannot do this can dictate something to McCue or an aide, and this language experience text substitutes for the student’s own writing and becomes the first reading material. Many of his students publish their writing in the school magazine, Voices: New Writers for New Readers,(2) or in School Daze, the school newspaper, which is entirely student-run.
The Academy, a union program in the Midwest (Soifer, Young, & Irwin, 1989), publishes student writing, as does the Adult Literacy Resource Institute in Boston. New Writers’ Voices (not to be confused with Voices: New Writers for New Readers from which it derives in conception, name, and layout) are small paperback volumes from Literacy Volunteers of New Yo rk City, each telling an adult student’s memories. East End Literacy Press (3) in Toronto [p.535] also publishes student autobiographies, focusing especially on women’s stories.
These are but a few of many examples that could be cited of programs using student writing as the basis for student literacy.
A. B. Facey (1981) taught himself to write so he could tell his story to his grandchildren; in the course of writing his autobiography he learned to read, but it was the driv e to tell his own story, not to read someone else’s that propelled his literacy. So too, with many new literates in both L1 and L2. Programs which start with student writing are making statements about whose messages need to be told and need to be read. By late 1991, Aguirre International is scheduled to have
completed its study of model adult education programs in the United States, and may then have a lengthy list of whole language
programs for ESOL adults.

RESEARCH

Holistic and naturalistic research into language and learning are part of the whole language movement; the research has been increasingly ethnographic over the last 10 years. The major characteristics of whole language research are:

1. A concern with the people being studied as people, rather than as unnamed subjects as in experimental research. Sometimes in whole language research, the people being studied are co-researchers. Instead of trying to discover how often X occurs in
Y situations, whole language researchers want to know what people think and how they go about developing their
knowledge.
2. A recognition of contexts as vital factors affecting results; these contexts include physical, social, economic, and political.
3. A willingness to accept the messiness that comes with opening the study to real people living real lives, seeking insights through personal histories and through reflections on those histories.

Illustrative examples are provided by the research of Read (1975); Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982); and Harste, Woodward, and Burke (1984). All interacted with and observed preschool children, trying to discover how these youngsters were thinking about literacy. The research of Read (1975) into youngsters’ grasp of alphabetic principles and the research in Spanish of Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982) on youngsters’ concepts of print both inform the whole language perspective on how literacy proficiency develops in [p.536] L1. The pioneering work of Harste, Woodward, and Burke (1984) with youngsters aged 3 to 6 demonstrated that emergent literacy—the barest beginnings of reading and writing by very young children—differed from the most sophisticated reading and writing of adults only in level of sophistication. The basic process of writing that children go through with their first scribbles is the same process an adult uses; proficiency does no t alter the process. Similarly, a
child’s first reading, perhaps of a McDonald’s sign or a brand name on a cereal box, is the same basic process used by sophisticated readers like subscribers to the TESOL Quarterly. Again, proficiency does not alter the process; it merely allows one to use the process more efficiently. The basic research procedure of all these was observational, not experimental.
Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines (1988) questioned the assumption that people of color living in extreme poverty were necessarily illiterate.
They spent over a year with families living in condemned buildings in New York City and concluded that even under abysmal living conditions, parents and children read and wrote together. Their study typifies recent holistic research in its ethnographic approach and in its myth-debunking conclusion. Whole language research with L2 populations has a history similar
to holistic research with L1 populations: it has moved from an interes t in literacy development to a concern with much larger
contexts; the research procedures of interviewing and observing continue, but are carried out in more long-term projects. Ethnographic research has strongly affected whole language research, both in its methods and in its broad focus.
The relatively early study by Goodman and Goodman (1978) asked how school children read in English as a second language (the research was carried out in 1972-1975 and reported in Rigg, 1977). A maj or question of that research was, “Does it make a difference what the student’s L1 is?” Speakers of Arabic, Navajo, Samoan, and Spanish read two complete stories aloud, and their reading was subjected to miscue analysis. The conclusion was clear: It doesn’t matter which first language an ESL student. speaks; the student’s ability to read (i. e., understand) material written in English is not determined by that student’s home language. The student’s background knowledge, on the other hand, does make a difference; if a story is culturally relevant, if it matches what the student knows about the world and about language, it is easier to read.
In 1984, the TESOL Quarterly published Hudelson’s “Kan Yu Ret an Rayt en Ingles,” a landmark study of a few youngsters developing literacy in English as an additional language. That study used repeated observations and interviews over time and showed [p.537] examples of children’s work. C urrently Hudelson and Irene Serna, a colleague at Arizona State University, are collaborating on a 3- year study of the L1 literacy development of Spanish-speaking students at Machan School. Both spend at least one day a week at the school, sitting in bilingual classes, observing and interacting with the children whose literacy they have been studying for 2 years now. They tape-record oral reading sessions and conversations with
the children and photocopy the children’s written work. Th e case-study approach gives researchers a chance to learn a great deal about a few people, and the insights gained from that knowledge can inform future research, curriculum design, and instruction.
In 1986 TESOL published Integrating Perspectives (Rigg & Enright) which explicitly cited teachers as classroom researchers
and which demonstrated one way in which researchers could integrate their perspectives. Chapters by Hudelson, Rigg, and
Urzúa each focused on one aspec t of a small group of Southeast Asian children in a U.S. school: Hudelson analyzed the children’s writing; Rigg analyzed their reading; and Urzúa reported on the contexts of school and home in which these children studied and lived. This integration of research was possible because the three shared a whole language view of language development.
In 1987 Edelsky reported 3 years of involvement and observation of a bilingual (Spanish-English) program at an elementary school. The v olume is almost alone among research studies in recognizing and discussing the political context affecting educational efforts. Whole language research with ESOL adults owes a debt to David Nunan (1988), who has carried out studies with thousands of students and hundreds of teachers in the Australian Adult Migrant Education Programme. Nunan uses questionnaires to discover teacher and student experiences and opinions; his insistence that teachers are the real creators of curriculum is based on responses from these surveys.
Nunan’s colleague Geoff Brindley (1986) has access to the same population of adult ESOL students and their teachers and has
researched various means of assessment, many of which rely on the students themselves to evaluate their progress in language and even to evaluate the sorts of teaching they prefer. This manifests genuine respect for the student.
That respect is carried further in Auerbach's (1991) description of a participatory curriculum, in which teachers become cocreators of curriculum with their students. The topic of this reflective research is student/teacher involvement in curriculum; the methods of research are conversation, observation, and reflection. Throughout, there is respect for the people involved, consideration of the [p.538] backgrounds each brings and the contexts each currently operates in, and an acceptance of the uncertainty that comes with dealing with real people and real concerns.

WHOLE LANGUAGE IN THE FUTURE?

Pendulums swing. Two forces threaten whole language teaching as it has been described here:
1. As whole language becomes a bandwagon term, it is used to mean a great many things, including the very ideas whole
language developed in opposition to. Unfortunately, it can no longer always be assumed to refer to a philosophy of education
that prizes holistic, natural ideas and respects the individual.
2. The current political situation in the U.S. bodes ill for all educational programs, but particularly for those that can be
labeled liberal.
Despite strong pressures on the whole language movement to transform into yet another ineffective attempt at reform, I predict
that the teachers who have learned to respect themselves and their colleagues as professionals, and their students as collaborators in building and disseminating knowledge will continue to work in the schools and will continue to demonstrate to the ir students, their colleagues, their administration, and their community that the best of the whole language perspective makes for the best education.

THE AUTHOR

Pat Rigg has a small consulting firm, American Language & Literacy, in Tucson, AZ. She has a longtime interest in literacy for both L1 and L2 speakers. Rigg edits TESOL’S Adult Education Newsletter and chairs the NCTE/TESOL Liaison
Committee. She is coeditor (with V. G. Allen) of W hen They Don’t All Speak English (NCTE, 1989).

Notes

1 Student names have been changed.

2 Available from the Lower Mainland Society for Literacy Education, 9260 140th street,
Surrey, B.C. V3V 5Z4, Canada.
3 East End Literacy press publications are available from Pippin Publishing, 150 Telson
Road, Markham, Ontario L3R 1E5, Canada.

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